Yochi Dreazen is a Managing Editor for News at Foreign Policy. He is also writer-in-residence at the Center for a New American Security. His book about military suicide was published by Random House's Crown division in 2014.

Prior to joining Foreign Policy, Dreazen was a contributing editor at the Atlantic and the senior national security correspondent for National Journal. He began his career at the Wall Street Journal and spent 11 years at the newspaper, most recently as its military correspondent. He was born in Chicago, and later attended the University of Pennsylvania. At Penn, he edited the award-winning daily campus newspaper and graduated Magna Cum Laude in 1999 with degrees in History and English. He was hired by the Wall Street Journal immediately after graduation. Dreazen arrived in Iraq in April 2003 with the Fourth Infantry Division, and spent the next two years living in Baghdad as the Wall Street Journal's main Iraq correspondent.

Dreazen has made more than 12 lengthy trips to Iraq and Afghanistan and has spent a total of nearly four years on the ground in the two countries, mostly doing front-line combat embeds. He has reported from more than 20 countries, including Pakistan, Russia, China, Israel, Japan, Turkey, Morocco, and Saudi Arabia.

In 2010, Dreazen received the Military Reporters & Editors association’s top award for domestic military reporting in a large publication for a series of articles about military suicide and the psychological traumas impacting veterans of the two long wars. His writing has appeared in the Washington Post, Smithsonian, Tablet and the New Republic and he appears regularly on TV and radio programs such as NPR's Diane Rehm Show and PBS' Washington Week with Gwen Ifill. Dreazen gives frequent lectures about journalism, the wars and current events to both civilian and military audiences.

Dreazen lives in Washington with his wife, Annie Rosenzweig Dreazen, and their beloved Golden Retriever, Charlie.

Israeli Intelligence Minister Yuval Steinitz said in an interview that it would be a mistake for the Obama administration to relax its sanctions on Iran or free up tens of billions of dollars in frozen Iranian funds, highlighting Jerusalem’s growing concern that the Obama administration may be willing to make too many concessions to Iran during the current nuclear talks between the two longtime adversaries.

Steinitz, a close political ally of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, told The Cable that the punishing Western sanctions that have been imposed on Iran are the only reason that government of Iranian President Hassan Rouhani is willing to engage in direct talks with the Obama administration. With the Iranian economy in free fall, Steinitz said the sanctions should be kept in place, or even strengthened, until Iran agreed to fully dismantle its nuclear weapons program.

“Iran is now coming to the negotiating table solely because of the pressure,” Steinitz said in the interview. “They are really on the verge of the collapse and that’s the reason they’re coming to the negotiating table with some willingness to negotiate.”

There’s no question that the current sanctions have devastated the Iranian economy. The measures have sharply limited overseas investment in Iran’s energy sector, locked foreign financial institutions that do oil-related business with Iran’s central bank out of the U.S. banking system, and required banks around the globe to freeze more than $50 billion of Iranian money. Steinitz said Israeli intelligence estimates that the sanctions have cost the Iranians at least $100 billion over the past 18 months and thrown the country into a deep recession.

Steinitz’s trip to Washington this week comes at a pivotal moment in the long Western campaign to persuade Tehran to abandon its nuclear ambitions. Senior U.S. officials who met with their Iranian counterparts in Geneva last week said the Iranian delegation signaled a willingness to take steps — including opening its facilities to intrusive international inspections and no longer enriching uranium to near weapons-grade levels — that wouldn’t have been on the table even a few months earlier.

If Iran carries out those commitments, senior administration officials have said that the U.S. would consider freeing up some or all of the roughly $50 billion in frozen Iranian money as a confidence-building measure.

The prospect of Iran gaining access to those funds has triggered alarm bells in Israel, which worries that it would give Tehran a much-needed influx of cash and soften the economic pressures facing the regime. In the interview, Steinitz said that the U.S. and its allies have all of the leverage in the current talks and shouldn’t give up any of it unless Iran agreed to entirely abandon its nuclear push.

"The pressure on the regime is enormous. You can get a very serious agreement for this. Don’t give it up so easily,” he told The Cable. “And don’t give them extra oxygen while you’re negotiating with them. On the contrary, increase the pressure."

At least for now, the Obama administration seems to prefer a different approach. Wendy Sherman, the State Department’s chief nuclear negotiator, has won over Iran hawks like Democratic Rep. Eliot Engel of New York by promising that the administration would support legislation imposing hard-hitting new restrictions on Iran’s mining and construction sectors if Tehran didn’t appear willing to make significant concessions during the current talks. At the same time, she has asked Congress to hold off on imposing new sanctions on Iran while the negotiations continue. That’s a significant departure from Israel’s call for the imposition of new sanctions while the talks are still taking place.

Washington’s early optimism about the current talks with Iran has been deeply unsettling to both Israel and many of the Sunni monarchies of the Persian Gulf. Steinitz will use this week’s visit to convey those concerns to the administration and push it to keep the current measures in place. It won’t have been the first time that a senior Israeli official has made that case, and it won’t be the last.

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Ty McCormickTy McCormick is an associate editor at Foreign Policy. Previously he was a freelance correspondent in Egypt, where he wrote about everything from military trials to revolutionary rap music. A 2011 Pulitzer Center grantee, he has written for Newsweek, the New Republic, the International Herald Tribune, and the Los Angeles Times, among others. He has also appeared as a commentator on Fox News and American Public Media’s Marketplace Tech. He holds a bachelor’s degree from Stanford University, and a master’s from the University of Oxford, where he was a Clarendon Scholar.
| The Cable |

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Josh Rogin covers national security and foreign policy and writes the daily Web column The Cable. His column appears bi-weekly in the print edition of The Washington Post. He can be reached for comments or tips at josh.rogin@foreignpolicy.com.

Previously, Josh covered defense and foreign policy as a staff writer for Congressional Quarterly, writing extensively on Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantánamo Bay, U.S.-Asia relations, defense budgeting and appropriations, and the defense lobbying and contracting industries. Prior to that, he covered military modernization, cyber warfare, space, and missile defense for Federal Computer Week Magazine. He has also served as Pentagon Staff Reporter for the Asahi Shimbun, Japan's leading daily newspaper, in its Washington, D.C., bureau, where he reported on U.S.-Japan relations, Chinese military modernization, the North Korean nuclear crisis, and more.

A graduate of George Washington University's Elliott School of International Affairs, Josh lived in Yokohama, Japan, and studied at Tokyo's Sophia University. He speaks conversational Japanese and has reported from the region. He has also worked at the House International Relations Committee, the Embassy of Japan, and the Brookings Institution.

Josh's reporting has been featured on CNN, MSNBC, C-Span, CBS, ABC, NPR, WTOP, and several other outlets. He was a 2008-2009 National Press Foundation's Paul Miller Washington Reporting Fellow, 2009 military reporting fellow with the Knight Center for Specialized Journalism and the 2011 recipient of the InterAction Award for Excellence in International Reporting. He hails from Philadelphia and lives in Washington, D.C.